


not bloody likely

by triplesalto



Category: The Crown (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:15:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27952967
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triplesalto/pseuds/triplesalto
Summary: After a foiled kidnapping attempt, Anne has tea with her parents.
Relationships: Anne Princess Royal/Mark Phillips
Comments: 18
Kudos: 77
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	not bloody likely

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Clio (clio_jlh)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/clio_jlh/gifts).



> Dear Clio,
> 
> I was so glad to read in your letter that you were a kindred spirit and desperately wanted MOAR ANNE (which has been my cry throughout Seasons 3 and 4). Since I could not _believe_ they left this particular royal chapter out of the show (what were they thinking?!), I knew immediately what story I wanted to tell. :) I hope you enjoy it!

“How are you feeling, dear?” 

Anne finds her mother’s undivided focus somewhat disconcerting. It’s unsurprising that it took something as dramatic as nearly being kidnapped by a nutter with a gun to be honoured with this unaccustomed attention, but now that she has it, she’s not quite sure she likes it. “Fine,” she says.

Her father snorts. 

Perhaps that was too abrupt. “I’m glad everyone is going to recover,” she offers.

“When I saw you, with your dress ripped in half, and Mark white as a sheet –”

“It wasn’t exactly ripped in half,” Anne says. “Though I grant you I was angry. I liked it.”

“High praise,” her father says, dryly. “The kidnapper should’ve asked before he destroyed it.”

Anne corrects the record, although why she’s being scrupulously fair to a kidnapper, she’s not entirely sure. “He didn’t mean to. Just a casualty of the tug-of-war.”

“My daughter, everyone,” her father says. “Gets in a tug-of-war with a gunman who’s already shot three people, because you can’t make Anne do anything she doesn’t want to.”

Anne grins at him. “Actually I channelled Mummy.”

Her mother makes a little shocked noise.

“I thought,” Anne says, gesturing with her cup, “that it would be silly to be rude at that particular juncture.”

“That particular juncture, meaning when a kidnapper has already shot some people and is holding a gun on you and telling you to get out of the car.”

“Yes. Well, I wasn’t getting out of the car, so I thought I shouldn’t make him even more angry by refusing rudely. Instead I did my best impression of Mummy and was scrupulously polite in telling him to go to the Devil.”

Her father laughs, and her mother says, “Anne.”

Anne sips her tea. “I do rather think I should be allowed to swear when discussing my own kidnapping.”

“ _Attempted_ kidnapping,” her father says, sounding ridiculously proud about it.

“And you never thought about going with him?” her mother asks.

“Never.” Not for a fucking second. “I’ve thought about it before. What I’d do. So I knew already.”

Knew, from the moment she heard the gunshots behind the car, when the nutter shot her protection agent. For a brief heart-stopping second, Anne had thought a bullet had come through the glass and hit her, and the world had slowed to a crawl. 

Then she had kept breathing, and nothing had hurt, and Mark had been next to her breathing fast and hard like a cornered animal in the hunt, his fear a tangible thing in the air between them, and then the gunman had shot the chauffeur and yanked open her door, and she’d been ready, with crystal clarity. _Not going fucking anywhere._

“You’d thought about it?” Her mother sounds fascinated. Or horrified. Or politely interested. Anne’s never quite sure, with her mother.

She meets her father’s eyes. 

“We talked about it once, cabbage,” he says. “When Anne was younger, and went to parties more. Before Mark.”

Anne remembers that conversation clearly. She’d still been her restless rebellious teenage self, but she and her father had always been close. He’d worried about her, less in a vague “oh dear what shall we do with Anne” kind of way like her mother and grandmother, and more about the specific risks she was taking. It had been a particularly wide-ranging conversation, moving from free love and royal bastards, to drug use and the history of her Aunt Margaret, to forging her own path through the public ghastliness attached to being one of the Family.

“If I recall,” she says now, “we talked about Victoria. Eight assassination attempts, weren’t there? Including the one where she was hit on the head with a cane and came away with a black eye and a nasty scar. I was rather glad to miss that part out myself.”

“One does have to think about it, I suppose,” her mother says, with something that might be a wince. “I have always hoped that you would be spared it. After all, he might have been expected to go after me and your father, not a young woman who isn’t even the heir.”

Anne has the wildest thought that her mother might be the smallest bit jealous of Anne being the focus of the nation’s attention for once. Not that she would probably want to be the one having her arm nearly torn off by a crazed gunman intent on forcing her out of her car and abducting her for God knows what perverted purpose, but. Still.

“I can tell you this,” her father says. “Mark hadn’t thought about it.”

Anne knows. She loves the man, but she’s under no illusion that he knew entirely what he was getting into when he stood up next to her four months ago in Westminster Abbey. How could he, without being raised in the claustrophobic fishbowl that is the Family? 

“He didn’t run,” she says. “He was afraid, but he stayed in the car when I made Rowena run. He held on to me as tightly as he could, and when the gunman pulled, he helped me pull back.”

“I would’ve punched the nutter in the face, if he’d tried it with Lilibet.”

“And then he would have shot you,” her mother says, with a fond edge to her tone. “I imagine Anne prefers Mark in one piece.”

She does, rather. It’s early days. Who knows what may happen in the future - she's too much of a realist to believe in fairytales and happy endings, even (especially) for princesses. But for now, she tends to like her handsome, horse-mad husband, even if Charles does call him Fog, on account of him being “thick and wet”. And it’s appealing that he has his own glory, the Olympic gold that means he’s not entirely living in her reflection. She wants one to match, and then they’ll be a pair, the two equestrian rebels who are only tangentially royal. 

“But it’s all rot, that bit about you being scrupulously polite,” her father says, abruptly changing the subject. “Because when Mark got done being green around the gills, he told me.”

Anne remembers the aftermath, standing in her ripped dress in the middle of the shocked whirl, with Mark vanished somewhere to be sick in private. She’d felt quite glamorous for a bit, higher on adrenaline than any drug she’d ever tried, and roaringly angry, once she’d let herself feel it. She’d played it cool, and always will, but the fact remained: she’d had a gun in her face, and she could have been dead. Because of who she is. 

“What did Mark tell you?” she says, keeping a straight face.

“Said the bugger waved the gun in your face and told you to get out of the car, and you said ‘Not bloody likely,’ cool as a cucumber.”

“ _Philip_.”

Anne can’t quite keep the smile down. “Well,” she says. “I may have said that eventually. It was rather a long conversation, you know. It must have been at least ten minutes. One did grow weary of the repetition.”

“And then you did a backwards somersault out of Mark’s door.”

“One does try to keep things interesting. And it made him leave my door and come around the back of the car, which meant that Mark could pull me back in and we could slam both doors before he made it around. Bought us an extra minute or two when he had to force the door open again.”

“Tomboy skills came in handy then,” her father says, and they grin at each other.

Her mother sets her cup down with a decisive clink. “It has all been very upsetting. But we are very glad you were not hurt.”

“Thanks, Mummy,” Anne says. “So am I.”

“Next time,” her father says, “grab his gun and shoot him.”

Her mother sighs.

Anne arches an eyebrow. “I just might.”

❧


End file.
